Don Martin: Tories on target for next vote

Conceived in tragedy after the École Polytechnique massacre, born as a billion-dollar boondoggle and raised as an auditor-general’s nightmare, six switched New Democrat votes gave the long-gun registry a reprieve yesterday.

An emotional 153-151 split in the House of Commons on Wednesday killed Candice Hoeppner’s private member’s bill to dismantle the 14-year-old registry and turn it into a federal payroll office.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper paused on the Commons exit stairs to declare the fight to mothball the registry far from over, noting public sentiment to kill it had never been stronger, nor the vote closer. He could easily have been practising for the campaign hustings.

Liberals and New Democrats planned celebrations in Ottawa last night. The Conservatives, however, were musing about holding victory celebrations in all 20 ridings where anti-registry Liberal or New Democrat MPs were forced or arm-twisted to switch their vote to support the registry.

The ultimate result is that a registry initially opposed by five provinces, dragged before the Supreme Court, vilified by Canada’s spending watchdog and considered an intrusive inconvenience by owners of 6.5 million registered rifles or shotguns will now become a plank in the next Conservative election platform.

Party insiders declare the defeat a golden opportunity to win up to a dozen NDP and Liberal ridings in the far north, parts of Newfoundland or Labrador and rural Ontario as the government continues to define itself as being on the right side of an alleged opposition trio coalition.

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What the Liberals and New Democrats have failed to grasp is how opposition is not rooted in the registry’s price tag or law enforcement value; it’s a visceral, DNA-ingrained hatred of the damned thing.

Behind every duck hunter who has dutifully obtained their licence and filled out forms only to sit on the phone waiting for a Miramachi registry voice to answer before being visited by a ‘‘verifier,’’ there’s an entire family who view it as an intrusive inconvenience. Those families will vote as a block against any candidate or party leader who thinks otherwise.

The delineation between police chiefs, who support the registry, and street constables, some of whom question its usefulness, is sufficiently wide to cast doubt on its merits as a policing tool. The RCMP argues it is accessed more often every day, but a dozen forces have added the registry to auto-query scans, artificially boosting those numbers by cops only interested in checking motorists for unpaid speeding tickets.

Ongoing government amnesties waiving penalties for those who fail to register raise legitimate concerns it is dangerously outdated. As well, a major source of long-gun violence are suicides, which no amount of registration could prevent.

And there is a paradox that has never been refuted with any common sense satisfaction — that a gun owner who is contemplating criminal activity would never voluntarily register a firearm that could become incriminating evidence.

There’s always the risk that another mass murder using an unregistered rifle could galvanize public opinion to preserve it. But most gun-owning Canadians who obey the law now feel mistrusted and mistreated. They saw yesterday as the right time for the registry to die.

That’s why the registry’s preservation is bad news for vote-switching MPs facing uncertain re-election and something the majority-seeking Tories will be only too happy to register as an official weapon in the next election campaign.